Part 1: MATRIX Philosophy and Cinematography

Dear friend,

I just finished re-watching the MATRIX; and oh man, this movie is so epic– not only in terms of the concept behind the film, but the ‘pop philosophy’ sayings are pretty good as well. And the cinematography is pretty solid as well.

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So if you’ve never watched the MATRIX, please please please watch it. I recommend watching the first one — the second two are good to watch if you’re a Matrix fan, but not necessary.

Anyways, if you don’t know the plot of the Matrix, it is simple: The ‘real’ world isn’t real. Instead, machines (AI–artificial intelligence) has turned human beings into batteries. We are hooked up to this false reality called the ‘matrix’.

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Now to me the premise of this movie is fascinating, because it was one of the first movies to make philosophy more accessible to the masses (at least of people of my generation). A lot of philosophy is brought into question, like Plato’s cave — where prisoners are stuck in a cave, and only shown shadows of the real world, yet they think it is real. This similar scene is in the film ‘El Topo’ by the film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky.

10 Philosophical Lessons from THE MATRIX

Anyways, here are some of my takeaways from the film, in terms of philosophy:

You can create your own reality. “There is no spoon” means that you can bend your own perception of reality.

We are special — the rules don’t apply to us.

If we lose self-belief (like how Neo says, “I can’t do this”) then we will lose.

Nobody likes that they don’t have control over their lives.

A lot of modern society blinds us from our own inner-truth.

The truth: we are slaves to the system of 9-5 employment, in order to ‘make a living’, and we are also constantly suckered by advertising/marketing/consumerism to continue playing this capitalist game.

The true prison is the prison of our own minds; we create our own self-inflicted prisons, yet we don’t know that we can break out of it, and that “there are no rules”.

Taking the red pill (true reality) is better than taking the blue pill (false reality). By taking the red pill, we are like Alice from Alice in Wonderland — we discover “How deep the rabbit hole goes” (seeking truth).

“Time is always against us”: Life is of limited time; our lives is figuring out how to best effectively utilize our human metabolism before we die.

Rebirth: Themes of rebirth are prevalent through the film — like when Neo takes the red pill, and wakes up into the “real world”.

Anyways there are more themes to cover in the film, let us continue by talking about the cinematography:

Contact Sheets

To start off, here are the contact sheets from the film. Note the prevalent green tones in terms of the color palette, highlighted with touches of red. Later on in the film, the scenes which are predominately red symbolize danger:

System-Green Kanji Computer Code

One of the most visually-iconic things from the film is the iconic System-Green Kanji Computer Code:

The Wachowski Brothers (now known as the Wachowski Sisters) have noted that they got their inspiration from Japanese Kanji/text.

To me the symbolism of the computer-code kanji is significant, because in some ways– the information we perceive in the real world can all eventually be abstracted into data. It is how we interpret this data which creates our own reality.

Skipping ahead in the film (spoiler alert), there is a point where Neo believes in himself, and he is able to see the false reality of the Matrix simply encoded as all green-computer-code-kanji:

Low angle shot of just Trinity’s eyes, then the camera slowly pans downwards, to reveal the cop lights, and then her hands up

To analyze this, note the negative black space from her computer which starts from the top of the frame, then lowers:

Elbow framing

Another nice shot: first starts off from the back of Trinity (her arms behind her head, with elbows in a triangle shape), then the next shot you see the cop’s head framed in-between her elbows/arms:

Note the triangles made with the elbows:

Then in the next shot, note the new angle, with the elbows blocking out the rest of the shot:

Gun scene

When Trinity is first running away from the agents, she jumps through a window, then draws her guns, waiting for the agents to enter. Note this nice change of camera angle and cinematography:

Note the leading lines:

Note trinity outlined in pink; the epic perspective, and the leading line of the stairs on the right in cyan:

Phone focus

Nice shot of the phone on the far left of the frame, then the next frame which focuses on trinity. A simple yet effective cinema technique:

Trinity about to get killed by truck

Next epic scene, note the shift of camera perspective, then trinity holding up her hand (as a gut instinct of fear):

Especially note the use of the red blood on her left eye, which is a nice contrast with the green/blue tones of the film.

Especially nice: the fingers on the far right of the frame, then the shadow on her eyes:

Searching ….

Metaphor of ‘searching’ — as humans we are all searching for something deeper– something with deeper meaning:

NEO is just a symbol and metaphor for all of us. A lot of us are lost…lost in our devices, the internet, and technology; striving for something deeper in our lives.

Wake up Neo…

Then Neo is prompted to ‘wake up’. Kind of us like us– we must all wake up from our techno-dream-daze of false reality:

On Nihilism

Then a fascinating scene; Neo sells some hacker-disk to some punks in exchange for money, and hides it inside a book that is called ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ — a book by Jean Baudrillard, on this essay on ‘Nihilism’ (philosophy of nothingness):

This is fun, because it takes us down a rabbit hole…of following the ‘White Rabbit’.

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